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Any forseeable problems with this board?

07-17-2009, 06:56 AM

I am planning on dropping off my ageing Biostar P4M80-M4 (VIA chipset with VIA graphics) since its starting to show signs of failure: 1 memory slot went bust recently and i feel that the whole thing is barely holding itself up together.

Looked through some offers and have settled on the following processor + board combination:

Will there be any problems with graphics and LAN drivers of this board in Linux? As in, will the GeForce 8100 (both 2D and 3D acceleration) and LAN port work right out of the box after installing Fedora, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu or Mandriva?

Ah the next one with a new box.
Hmm, Biostar writes nothing about Linux but lists 10 versions of Windows. They also offer no (rebranded) drivers for linux on their page.

Afair. nvidia will not work out of the box since Distributions do not ship the unfree driver (are not allowed to). (My info on that may not be recent though). Still many of them use the nv as default and just offer to download the binary driver for access of 3d functions. Note that some of the nvidia chips become really hot.
That RTL8201CL looks new to me but seems to be a few years on the market already, I'd have to look up my Kernel config of 2.6.30 if it shows anything like that being supported.
I'm not completely sure about that nvidia stuff. I don't trust nvidia but this is my personal opinion. The basics in the chipset should work with a recent kernel, it's the GPU you will need closed drivers for.
The RTL sound chips should be working in ALSA.
But then make sure to have some means of flashing the BIOS.